A multi-channel installation for steel and electronics. Elements of a musical composition are fed into a suspended piece of steel in a darkened room. These elements resonate the steel and are dispersed back through the space in order to create an extended composition that takes place both in the room and within the metal

This installation is part of a wider research project into aesthetics of affect, where art produces a sensation through the use of sound and/as sculpture. The aim of the installation is to demonstrate how aural phenomena manifest themselves in space and how this can affect the listener’s perception. By using the space of the installation as a space for composition, the work can act to create a live agency of the listeners sense of perception with the intent of reconsidering what constitutes sensation.

Terence Sharpe is an Irish sound artist and composer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His sound work is concerned with developing aesthetics in physicality and presence, affect and sensation, and he presents these works through harsh, reduced noise that interchanges with moments of restrained minimalism. He is currently working on his first album as well as installation work.

Equal parts ambient and virtuosic, melancholic and playful, waves of bass loops are garnished with harmonica drones and constant improvisational exploration. This is deep-sea-diving for the hungry and alone. While certainly following in the footstep of great bassists like Mingus and Meyer, Boyd’s aesthetic sensibility also seeks to wed the minimalism of Reich and Glass with what might be called the maximalism of Beethoven chamber music. But all this is further complicated by the presence of Boyd’s improvisational prowess. Not funky, not a bassplayer’s bassplayer exactly, but something refreshing and impressive-improvising with fingers that only know how to dance to the deepest tunes.

AUN is a Montreal based duo, which melts the boundaries between psychedelic, electronic, ambient, shoegaze and kosmische music. Since their 2007 inception, AUN have kept a very busy international touring schedule, performing at such diverse festivals as, Mutek, Roadburn, Wave Gothic, Victoriaville, Swingfest, all the while releasing highly praised albums on several esteemed labels namely: Alien8 Recordings, Important, Cyclic Law, Oral and Denovali.

Soon to embark on a month long European tour (October 2012), with planned stops at Germany’s Phobos and Latvia’s Zemlika festivals, AUN will be presenting recent and unreleased material, in their characteristically unique, ethereal audio and visual performances.

thisquietarmy is the experimental guitar-based project of Eric Quach from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, active since 2005. Revolving around improvised drone music, he takes his sonic experimentations further by adding textural and structural elements of post-punk, shoegaze, krautrock, post-rock, black metal and doom metal to them. The results can be described as dark, melodic, expansive and engaging dreamscapes.

His live performances are mostly presented as a real-time score to hypnotic ethereal visuals, which he creates himself for each performance. thisquietarmy’s latest recordings “Resurgence” & “Vessels” appears on Denovali Records (Germany) & Aurora Borealis (UK). He has also recorded for Alien8 Recordings (Canada), Basses Fréquences (France), Elevation (USA), Foreshadow (Poland), Killer Pimp (USA), Land of Decay (USA), Lunasylum (Belgium), Orange Milk (USA), three:four (Switzerland) as well as his own imprint TQA Records (Canada).

thisquietarmy has also collaborated extensively with Aidan Baker (Nadja), Scott Cortez (Lovesliescrushing), Monarch!, Yellow6 & Year of No Light.

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Black Isle Corpus

Black isle Corpus is the secretive new project of dazzling Edinburgh musicians Matthew Collings and Christos Michalakos. This is their first gig.

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Hiva Oa (acoustic)

Hiva Oa produce music with a fragile sense of melancholy, buried under a brooding darkness. Guitars, bass, cello, the odd piano and haunting vocals combine to create something unique and intensely evocative. Blending acoustic sounds with more experimental moments the band has created an EP (Future Nostalgia For Sale) and album (The awkward hello, handshake, kiss.)that are distinct and immediately compelling. The beauty of Hiva Oa lies in the understated, and this acoustic set will prove just that.

Dialogues Festival is proud to present legendary saxophonist Evan Parker‘s new project for improvising ensemble. Thanks to a PRSF/Creative Scotland Beyond Borders award, Dialogues (Edinburgh) and Sonorites (Belfast) were able to commission Evan to develop a new piece for different constellations of improvising musicians. The result is “Self Organising Systems“, a dynamic screed of structured-spontaneous music making.

Here is what Evan Parker has been saying about the project;

The gradual acceptance of improvisation as a natural development in electronic/computer and acoustic/instrument fields and in hybrid electro-acoustic music over the last 40 years has resulted in a community of ‘composer/performers’ with expertise in these areas. The kind of processes described in Wolf’s or Stockhausen’s music are ripe for revisiting in light of the current state of things: musicians, instruments and audience have evolved in response to general accessibility of computing power. The challenge in this commission is to think of materials/approaches relevant to an improvising small group without recourse to complex notation.

Sonorities premiered their version in March 2012 and Dialogues is delighted to announce Edinburgh’s lineup, a group comprised of several of Scotland’s most original improvisers. We also invited virtuoso double bass player John Eckhardt over from Germany. He’ll join the Edinburgh ensemble but will also open the night with a set derived from his extraordinary album Xylobiont:http://www.johneckhardt.de/solo.

Space is limited so please book early to ensure you get in. The best way is to book in advance via eventbrite, print your ticket and bring it along. You’ll get in first. Those arriving expecting tickets on the door may not get in.

Last year Sweden’s experimental ambient/drone meister Jasper TX played for us in the Cafe Diablo (a then-part cafe, part-antique light shop), definitely one of the more bizarre gigs in the recent Grind Sight canon. Jasper Tx returns to Edinburgh shores for his LAST EVER TOUR supporting Richard Knox and Frederic Oberland, supported by Matthew Collings.

Hope you’ll join us at the WEE RED BAR, 11th April 2012, in co-operation with our friends at Pendulum Man

Advance tickets includes an exclusive 3-track EP including ‘Drawing Lines To The End Of The World’, an epic extract from The Rustle Of The Stars, and new material from Jasper TX and Matthew Collings. Tickets HERE!!!

450 km from the arctic circle, ‘The Rustle of the Stars’ is a phenomenon of austere beauty, a barely audible noise that occurs when the draught from human breath causes multiple collisions among the ice micro-crystals in the air. A collaboration between Richard Knox (Glissando / A-Sun Amissa) & Frederic D. Oberland (FareWell Poetry, The Freemartin Calf), ‘The Rustle of the Stars’ is an audio journey through the North Pole explorer diaries.

In Rich & Frederic’s own words –

“We would like to think of this album as a polar journey to the ends of the earth through the arctic sea. We kept in mind the first polar expeditions, Edgar Allan Poe’s Dream-Land, the ships trapped or crushed by ice, the point of no-return, the minds sinking, the attempt on the Pole ending in disaster, the quest of the Northwest Passage, Erebus & Terror, the Mercy Bay, Mangazeya, Charles Francis Hall, Beechey Island, the Midnight sun and the Polar night.”

PM Concerts is thrilled that this will be the first ever live performance of The Rustle Of The Stars.

Jasper TX is the musical moniker of Sweden’s Dag Rosenqvist. Using electric and acoustic guitar, piano, pump organ, melodica, glockenspiel, voice and various other instruments as a foundation for his compositions, Dag has managed to create his own musical universe. Elements of post rock, drone, improvisation, noise and lo-fi aesthetics mix with a melodic pop sensibility that results in something quite unique.

Dag will releasing his last album as Jasper TX, An Index of Failure in Spring 2012. His past live performances have been described as “physical”, “intense” and “stunningly beautiful”. Just as this gig sees the very beginnings of one act, this will be Jasper TX’s final ever performance in Scotland. Miss this to your eternal cost.

Tiny delicate moments of intimacy and all-consuming noise; the music of composer and sound artist Matthew Collings is textural, melodic and often sonically overwhelming. Spanning the divide between classic minimalism and avant-garde guitar music, Collings has already found considerable praise from the international community for his previous releases under the curious moniker Sketches for Albinos, releasing a series of records in the USA (Ropeadope) and Japan (Nothings66 records).

Currently based in Edinburgh, he is establishing a reputation as a live performer, notably with his piece ‘Flags of a Dead Ship’, for Multiple Electric Guitars, Prepared Amplifier, Room Acoustics and Laptop, expanding on the experience of putting together multiple guitar ensembles. His debut full-length album, ‘Splintered Instruments’, produced by Bedroom Community’s Ben Frost, and recorded at Reykjavik’s famed Greenhouse Studios, will be released in 2012.

The partnership of Craig Tattersall and Andrew Hargreaves collectively know as The Boats enters into its seventh year. In this time they have released a catalogue of seven albums, four EP’s and have appeared on many compilations. The duo thought it was time to push the status quo and break the album cycle. 2011 will see the group perform their latest work live before an audience. The improvised piece entitled “Do The Boats Dream Of Electric Fritz Pfleumer?” will be performed through an intricate tape loop system offering more wow and flutter than ever before. The show will see the group present a poem to the magic of magnetic tape, dreams and the synth pallet of Greek hero Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou. As always the music will reflect a process that sees The Boats passing the experimental through a skewed pop filter creating a sound that uncovers a friendly more fragile side to the avant-garde. These will be special unique events not to be missed.

Andrew met Craig at a failed attempt of an art happening. Both feeling slightly disappointed that the sacrificial bonfire didn’t reach the height or casualties of The Wicker Man, their raised eyebrows met and a conversation started. The result of this exchanging of words was the creation of The Boats.

The pair worked hard and in no time at all had released a trilogy of albums for Moteer records (Songs By The Sea, We Made It For You and Tomorrow Time). For the next trio of albums the duo chose three different labels, their own in house Our Small Ideas for an album of the same name, Flau of Tokyo for Faulty Toned Radio and London/Tokyo based Home Normal for Words Are Something Else.

Graveyard Tapes are Euan McMeeken and Matthew Collings. The pair met when Matthew moved from Iceland to Edinburgh in 2010.

Coming from very different musical backgrounds but sharing a love of many of the same artists the pair have been working together on recordings ever since. This will be their very first live performance.

Chris Tenz is a Calgary (Canada)-born, self taught multi-instrumentalist. Since the release of his debut record in June, 2009, he has tirelessly worked on expanding his sound with two solo projects, and as one half of “Language of Landscape”. His work consistently relies on mood and subtlety, never trying to hide or distract from the honest emotion being conveyed.

For over a year, he has turned his attention towards his local community, creating and organising unique events to help expose and connect many local artists of various disciplines. He has also been collaborating with theater and film producers, performing, and in October 2010 released two hand packaged, extremely limited full length solo albums which were sold at local performances only.

He is now finishing up a new full length album, which promises to be his most mature, developed, and unique work to date. Plans are for an autumn release this year, on mini50 records.

‘The world’s wildest free drummer (Chris Corsano: Cold Bleak Heat ,
duos with Mick Flower, Bill Nace , etc.) and the world’s wildest free
steal pedal guitarist, (Heather Leigh:, Dream Aktion Unit, Jandek,
etc.), pits two of the landscapes most intense pyromaniacs against
each other in — “The Rocker” — a blast-furnace of blisteringly
joyous witch-howling assaults on the essence of whips and chains and repressive injustice gone legal…The 1st time Heather & Chris played together, (a first meeting improv 4tet performance — Babes on the Loose), I watched in disturbed horror as Heather crashed her steel pedal to the stage and sliced her hand while trying to play upside down. Then she passed out. Corsano rushed to her aid, but had to stop and bandage his own bloodied digits, as rivers of crimson soaked the frightened platform’ – PAUL FLAHERTY

Jailbreak is the duo of pedal steel/vocalist Heather Leigh and drummer Chris Corsano. The name foregrounds the kind of outlaw violence with which the two reformulate rock/roll instants by bringing free jazz fire power to amp-humping sex beats. Their musical alliance goes all the way back to the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, the birthplace of the ‘New Weird America’, where Corsano and his long-term saxophone partner Paul Flaherty joined Leigh and Christina Carter for a quartet show that took the roof off the building and the skin off their fingers. Since then Corsano and Leigh have worked together as part of Taurpis Tula and as members of Thurston Moore’s Dream/Aktion Unit. Jailbreak play improvised music that dispenses with traditional notions of call and response or dialogue in favour of a profound simultaneity that would birth instant forms from the application of high energy strategies. Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar sources and deforms them with overdriven electricity, playing a form of future-blues exploded by super-charged currents. Corsano detonates time, literally blows it to pieces, in favour of a profound polyrhythmic feel that would confuse past and future. Yet the whole thing rocks like it hasn’t a braincell to spare, re-connecting avant garde tactics and ass-whooping rama-lama with alla the revolutionary fanfare of the most radical counter-cultural two-chord punk. They’ve released an LP on Family Vineyard, The Rocker, and a CD on Nyali Recordings, Colour Them Gone.

MUSCLETUSK

Distorted drone cloaks itself around wild percussion that occasionally turns into a gabba beat, while mashed-up samples collide with spastic oscillations, occasionally giving out to stadium rock power chords. I’ve said it in these pages before, but rock’n’roll has about as much rebellion left in it as bingo, and if you say punk’s got any balls then that’s just what you’re talking. But along with the other loons from Giant Tank, this shit is pure attitude’ – THE SKINNY

Hey everyone!
Yes we’ve been away for a long time…It’s been 5 Months since our last gig with Superimpose at St. Cecilia’s Laigh Room

BUT WE ARE BACK!

GrindSightOpenEye presents:

Lamb’s Gamble
Usurper
Grant Smith + Graham Stewart
Sean Williams

October 1st
Banshee Labyrinth
8pm doors
£5 entry

– – – – – – – – – – –

Lambs Gamble, featuring members of Vialka, KRK and Peeesseye, sounds like a room full of robotic centipedes with low blood sugar trying to chew their way through a load-bearing wall of serious music while balancing a pile of miniature oddities on the interior of your fragmented skull.

Lambs Gamble is Eric Boros (guitar, electronics and ultra drift), George Cremaschi (bassflub and electronics) and Fritz Welch (drums, voice and heave). They all met in 2001 at CESTA in Tabor CZ. George and Fritz initially started as a duo releasing “Memory Collapse” on Evolving Ear Records in 2002. Eric joined up in 2009 for a concert tour of Italy. They were especially hated in Bologna!
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“The first thing that makes a Usurper show such a thrilling experience is the sudden and palpable sense of self-awareness that squirms over the audience as these two Edinburgh-based self-professed “luddite twins” take their seats and begin, playfully but sincerely, to investigate their apparatus. The particular sense of the audience’s predicament is perhaps common to a lot of dynamically slight electro-acoustic improvisation and yet there is something about the way these two crunch, gobble, spit, contort and twang their assortment of metallic globes, combs and racks tonight that brings a peculiarly refreshing lo-brow, often very comic charm to what is usually a much more academic and “accomplished” endeavour.” -Foxy Digitalis.

GRANT SMITH + GRAHAM STEWART

Grant is a guitarist playing in muscletusk and fordell research unit. Graham is approximately half of scrim and all of king rib. Together they shall be doing unpleasant things to synthesizers…

SEAN WILLIAMS

Sean is playing “Spiral” by Karlheinz Stockhausen, a piece that explores the musical transformation of shortwave sounds – speech, music, code, interference and noise.

Matthias Mueller on trombone and Christian Marien on drums sound like what they are: a working band. They met in 2003 in Berlin, Germany’s capital of improvised music, and their collaboration resulted in the foundation of the duo „Superimpose“ in 2006. Since then they very consciously developing their music, using and at the same time questioning the full range of musical parameters such as dynamics, density, rhythm, sound, form and tonality. They take paths you can only discover after playing together for a long time with high intensity. The outcome is a raw music, at the same time brutal and peaceful, ugly and nice.

humansacrifice began singing in the hallelujah bacon church at the tender age of a heathen actionist goatherd. He has spent many hours avoiding work and death while playing drums and exploring other sculptural possibilities. In this practice the fundamental determinance of line and volume is accumulated in a collision of stripped down and never ending ocular vibration.

AUN is a Montreal based duo, which melts the boundaries between psychedelic, electronic, ambient, shoegaze and kosmische music. Since their 2007 inception, AUN have kept a very busy international touring schedule, performing at such diverse festivals as, Mutek, Roadburn, Wave Gothic, Victoriaville, Swingfest, all the while releasing highly praised albums on several esteemed labels namely: Alien8 Recordings, Important, Cyclic Law, Oral and Denovali.

Soon to embark on a month long European tour (October 2012), with planned stops at Germany’s Phobos and Latvia’s Zemlika festivals, AUN will be presenting recent and unreleased material, in their characteristically unique, ethereal audio and visual performances.

thisquietarmy is the experimental guitar-based project of Eric Quach from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, active since 2005. Revolving around improvised drone music, he takes his sonic experimentations further by adding textural and structural elements of post-punk, shoegaze, krautrock, post-rock, black metal and doom metal to them. The results can be described as dark, melodic, expansive and engaging dreamscapes.

His live performances are mostly presented as a real-time score to hypnotic ethereal visuals, which he creates himself for each performance. thisquietarmy’s latest recordings “Resurgence” & “Vessels” appears on Denovali Records (Germany) & Aurora Borealis (UK). He has also recorded for Alien8 Recordings (Canada), Basses Fréquences (France), Elevation (USA), Foreshadow (Poland), Killer Pimp (USA), Land of Decay (USA), Lunasylum (Belgium), Orange Milk (USA), three:four (Switzerland) as well as his own imprint TQA Records (Canada).

thisquietarmy has also collaborated extensively with Aidan Baker (Nadja), Scott Cortez (Lovesliescrushing), Monarch!, Yellow6 & Year of No Light.

——————

Black Isle Corpus

Black isle Corpus is the secretive new project of dazzling Edinburgh musicians Matthew Collings and Christos Michalakos. This is their first gig.

——————

Hiva Oa (acoustic)

Hiva Oa produce music with a fragile sense of melancholy, buried under a brooding darkness. Guitars, bass, cello, the odd piano and haunting vocals combine to create something unique and intensely evocative. Blending acoustic sounds with more experimental moments the band has created an EP (Future Nostalgia For Sale) and album (The awkward hello, handshake, kiss.)that are distinct and immediately compelling. The beauty of Hiva Oa lies in the understated, and this acoustic set will prove just that.